Random Country Calling Code

How this country calling code generator works

Press Generate and you get a country and the number you dial to reach it. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy puts the lot on your clipboard. Everything runs in your browser.

Three filters narrow things before the draw:

• Starts with: one letter, matched against the first character of the entry.
• Contains: any string, matched anywhere. This is the useful one here, because you can search the code as well as the country.
• Ends with: one character, matched against the last, which here is the final digit of the code.

Now, the thing nobody tells you about these numbers. They are not arbitrary. A calling code encodes two pieces of information at once, and once you can read it, +977 and +33 stop looking like phone numbers and start looking like a map with a date on it.

The first digit tells you the continent

The world was carved into nine zones. Look at the first digit of any calling code and you know the region before you know the country.

• 1 is North America and much of the Caribbean.
• 2 is Africa. Morocco is +212, Algeria +213, Nigeria +234, South Africa +27.
• 3 and 4 are Europe. Greece +30, Netherlands +31, France +33, Spain +34, Germany +49.
• 5 is Central and South America.
• 6 is Southeast Asia and Oceania.
• 7 is Russia and Kazakhstan, and nobody else.
• 8 is East Asia and a set of special services.
• 9 is the Middle East and South Asia. Nepal is +977, India +91, Pakistan +92.

Zone 9 is the densest on the map, because it covers the two most populous countries on Earth and everything between them.

Zone 0 does not exist. In most countries 0 is the trunk prefix, the digit you press before an area code when calling inside your own country, so it could never begin an international code.

The length tells you who got there first

Here is the part that turns a phone code into a piece of history.

Calling codes are one, two, or three digits long. The single-digit codes are the shared ones, +1 and +7. Everything else is two digits or three, and there are far more threes than twos.

The two-digit codes were handed out from 1960. They went to the countries that were large, or that already had significant telephone networks. The three-digit codes started being issued in 1964, once the two-digit space had run out.

So a short code does not mean an important country. It means an early one. France has +33 and Germany has +49 because they were in the room in 1960. Nepal has +977 and Eritrea has +291 because they were not.

Which is why a country's calling code is, quietly, a timestamp. The digits tell you where. The number of digits tells you when.

Practise on these: Bhutan +975, Chile +56, Ghana +233, Iceland +354, Japan +81, Kenya +254, Mexico +52, Norway +47, Peru +51, Vietnam +84.

Thirteen countries share the code +1

Most calling codes belong to one country. A few do not.

+1 is the largest sharing arrangement in the world. Thirteen sovereign countries answer to it: Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Canada, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States. Several territories use it too.

They are not sharing a country. They are sharing a numbering plan. Under it, what looks like an area code to an American is functionally a country code to a Barbadian.

+7 is shared by Russia and Kazakhstan, a leftover of the Soviet numbering plan that neither country has unpicked.

+39 reaches both Italy and Vatican City.

If you are writing software that maps a phone number to a country, this is the detail that will break you. A calling code does not identify a country. It identifies a numbering plan, and a numbering plan can hold thirteen of them.

The code reserved for disasters

Not every code belongs to a place.

The ITU has assigned +888 to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, for the purpose of facilitating disaster relief. When an earthquake takes out a country's telephone network, the relief operation needs a number that does not depend on the network that just fell over.

There are others in the same family. The codes +881, +882 and +883 are shared codes assigned to networks rather than nations: satellite operators and international carriers among them. Dial one and you are not calling a country. You are calling a constellation, or a company.

None of these is a country. Which is why the ITU calls its document a list of assigned country codes rather than a list of countries. Somebody there was being careful with a word, and almost nobody noticed.

Ways people actually use this

• Testing phone validation. If you have built a signup form, generate twenty of these and try them. Something in your regular expression hates +1.
• Geography quizzes with a twist. Show the code, ask for the country. Much harder than the other way round, and the first digit is a free hint.
• Working out where a missed call came from. Not from this tool, but from knowing the zone map above. A +7 you were not expecting is different from a +33 you were not expecting.
• Teaching how standards work. The calling code system is a small, complete, understandable example of a global standard that everybody quietly obeys.
• Filling in test data. Real codes, correctly formatted, without having to look any of them up.

Getting more out of the filters

• Type +1 into Contains and the countries sharing that code come back at once. It is the fastest way to see the North American numbering plan in full.
• Type +2 into Contains and you have pulled most of Africa. Type +3 and you have most of Europe.
• Ends with reads the last character, which here is the last digit of the code. Setting it to 7 gives you every country whose code happens to finish in a seven, which is a genuinely strange set of neighbours.
• Starts with matches the country name, not the code, because the country name comes first in each entry.

Questions people ask

Who decides a country's calling code?

The International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency based in Geneva. The rules live in a recommendation called E.164, and the assignments are published in the ITU's operational bulletin.

Why is there a plus sign in front?

Because the digits you dial to get out of your own country are not the same everywhere. The plus is a placeholder meaning "whatever the international prefix is here". Your phone substitutes the right one.

Why do some countries share a code?

Because they share a numbering plan rather than a border. Thirteen countries answer to +1. Russia and Kazakhstan both answer to +7. It is administrative history, not geography.

Why does France have a short code and Nepal a long one?

Timing. Two-digit codes were issued from 1960, three-digit ones from 1964 onwards. A short code means a country was early to the international network, not that it matters more.

Is there a country with the code 0?

No, and there never will be. In most countries 0 is the prefix you dial before a domestic area code, so it cannot also begin an international one.

References

1. List of ITU-T Recommendation E.164 assigned country codes
2. ITU operational bulletin, assigned country codes
3. ISO 3166 country codes